


Gulf

by oselle



Series: Birthright [42]
Category: The Faculty (1998)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alien Resistance, Alternate Universe, Angst, Conspiracy, Drug Dealing, Friendship/Love, Gen, Men in Black - Freeform, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 12:50:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oselle/pseuds/oselle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zeke and Casey, on the Gulf together, and then later, Zeke, alone, facing the past and the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gulf

Lafayette County, 2002  
2002 was the best year, most of it anyway.

They left Minnesota in May, even though neither of them wanted to go. But Zeke knew they had been in one place for too long, and besides, it was time to get out and make some money again.

Zeke still had enough cash left over to let them take it easy for a while, so they drifted down to Florida. Within two days Zeke had hooked up with a guy who went by the dubious name of Slim Jim, and when Zeke saw him, he understood why. Slim Jim was more than slim, he was a walking scarecrow who would have made Keith Richards look ruddy with health. When Zeke met him, in the parking lot of a fried chicken takeout near Lake City, Slim Jim was wearing cutoffs and a yellowing shirt that flapped around his skinny hips; Zeke would soon realize these were just about the only clothes that Slim Jim wore. Jim was also wearing the giddy expression of a man who’s gotten half his brain fried by drugs and booze, while the other half is still trying to figure out just when the hell the 1970s ended and why no one had told him.

Zeke got in the front seat of Jim’s truck so that Jim could give him the stuff to deliver.

“I’d do it myself,” Jim yammered, “but I gotta stay close to home base, y’know. I’m a wanted man.”

“Right,” Zeke said. He glanced out the window to make sure Casey was still in the car; Zeke could see Casey in the front seat, his feet up on the dashboard while he sucked idly on a soda. On a hunch, the sort of hunch that had gotten them this far along, Zeke opened up the foil-wrapped packet that Jim had given him. Just looking at it, Zeke knew it was crap. He handed it back to Jim.

“I’m not delivering this. It’s shit, I’m going to get my brains blown out just for handing it over.”

Jim gaped at him. Three of his front teeth were missing.

“Listen, man, that is Grade-A Prime! I cut that myself!”

“With what, baby powder? I can fucking smell it, for Chrissake.”

“Oh right, the fucking expert. The fucking chicken-joint parking lot expert. I’ll bet you do a better job,” Jim said, and suddenly Zeke had an idea.

That was how Zeke and Casey wound up living with Slim Jim the Dope Dealer, deep in the swamps of Lafayette County, Florida, in the summer of 2002.  


  
_____  
  


Slim Jim lived like the dark B-side of a Jimmy Buffet song—Margaritaville meets Dogpatch. His “home base” was a shack with a filthy kitchen and living room, and a bedroom where Zeke seldom ventured. He and Casey slept on a mattress on the living room floor. There was a bathroom (miraculously—when Zeke first saw the place, he had expected the plumbing would consist of a pump and an outhouse) and a sagging front porch; off the kitchen was a screened porch that seemed a recent addition, as if Slim Jim had been taken by a sudden fit of home improvement. He had even put a hammock in the screened porch, and that was where Casey spent most of the day, pushing off with his foot against the wall to make the hammock swing. Zeke could keep an eye on Casey there, sprawled in the hammock and eating endless popsicles while Zeke was in the kitchen, mixing up batches of counterfeit blow.  
  
Slim Jim hadn’t batted an eye when Zeke had introduced him to Casey, and that was the beauty of guys like Jim—their lives were such long-running freak shows that nothing seemed remotely strange to them. The notion that Zeke and Casey were brothers had raised eyebrows in even slightly more polite society, but Jim had merely broken into a cracked rendition of “He Ain’t Heavy” that had sent Casey off into gales of laughter. Nothing about Casey’s behavior fazed Jim in the slightest, and Zeke often thought that Jim was so fried he didn’t even notice that there was anything wrong with Casey. In fact, when Jim and Casey played cards on the screened porch in the evening, Casey usually won, and Zeke was pretty sure Jim wasn’t letting him.  
  
So Jim was cool, but he was also filthy. Zeke had thought he’d seen it all but he spent his first two days at Jim’s place just cleaning up the joint. He told Jim it was for the work, which was partially true, but really he just wanted to be able to find a clean fork if he needed it. Preferably one that Jim hadn’t scratched his skinny ass with.  
  
In addition to being filthy Jim was, of course, nuts. There were drugs all over the place—pills, coke, pot. There were also guns, everything from hillbilly rifles to at least one semiautomatic weapon. After Jim had passed out one night, Zeke had taken the ammo out of every one of them and stashed it under the kitchen sink. Jim never noticed.  
  
Jim was also a conspiracy enthusiast, which Zeke found highly entertaining. The few books that Jim had in the place mostly began with the word “Unsolved” or “Hidden,” and he appeared to be a regular subscriber to a cheaply-published conspiracy rag named The Lone Gunmen. Zeke sometimes wondered if it would blow what was left of Jim’s mind to tell him about Herrington, and just how he and his not-brother Casey had wound up in Jim’s swamp shack cutting drugs and eating popsicles in the middle of a Florida summer.  
  
One night, while Casey slept on the mattress and the TV and air conditioner blurred into a soporific hum, Zeke started flipping through a battered copy of Jim’s favorite periodical when he came to a two-page spread, and his heart gave a nasty little jump.  


  
ALIEN INVASION OR TEENS GONE WILD???   
  


Zeke could have answered that question easily. They got a few things wrong (the school hadn’t caught fire and there was no mention of Marybeth), but they got many other things right. The pictures were the worst of it, though. Blurry shots of the school from the outside, yearbook photos of Miss Burke, Principal Drake and Mr. Furlong.  
  
Zeke did not often think about Herrington or what had happened. Over the years, his mind had become focused on Casey and their own survival, and the actual events that had set them on this road faded in the background. Now here it was, in front of him, and the first thought that came to him was in Casey’s voice, from the one time that Casey had visited him in jail.  
  
What if it happens somewhere else?  
  
It IS happening, Zeke thought, looking at the shrill headline. There was no way it wasn’t, no way that it had been some fluke. It was happening right now. Zeke had a sudden, desperate urge to talk to Stokely, but Slim Jim had no phone. Tomorrow, Zeke thought firmly. Tomorrow he would drive into town and call Stokely.  
  
Casey muttered in his sleep, breaking Zeke’s thoughts. He looked over at Casey, curled up on the mattress, sunburned and mosquito-bitten, and still too skinny. Casey had turned 20 the month before, but no one would have known it to look at him. Not our problem, Zeke had told Casey that day in the Marion County Jail. He remembered the look of bitter disappointment on Casey’s face. That had been the Casey who’d been about to disappear, although he didn’t know it, of course; the Casey who was just days away from getting locked up in some place where the people responsible for Herrington would do their damndest to make sure he’d never tell anyone about it. No one had helped Casey. No one had helped any of them.  
  
Zeke looked at the magazine again, then back at Casey.  
  
He stood up and went outside, rolling the magazine up in his hand. Jim kept a metal barrel out in the yard, where he burned trash. Zeke spun the wheel on his lighter and held the flame to the magazine. When it was on fire, he threw it into the barrel and watched it burn.  
  
“Not our problem,” he said, and went back inside before the mosquitoes could eat him alive.  


  
_____  
  


Summer was good, even in the squalor of Slim Jim’s bizarre life.  
  
Zeke cooked up drugs and took Casey along on delivery runs to Lake City and Gainesville, sometimes even up to Tallahassee. They made good money. Jim put on a new shirt. Casey peeled and tanned; his hair turned amber in the Florida sun.  
  
Proving that nothing is impossible, Slim Jim had a girlfriend. “Lady friend” was more appropriate, since Cheryl’s girlhood was as lost as most of Jim’s brain cells. Cheryl lived in Perry in the summer; she spent winter in Key West, where she could pick up housekeeping and waitressing jobs and the tips were good. Cheryl came out to Jim’s now and then, usually bringing a trunkful of groceries and clean laundry. She hadn’t been even slightly surprised to find two strangers staying with Jim—like Jim, she accepted oddness without question. Unlike Jim, she could tell that something about Zeke and Casey’s story didn’t add up. Zeke saw this in the faint narrowing of her eyes when he said that Casey was his brother, but Zeke felt no threat from her. She seldom asked him questions, and she took a motherly interest in Casey. The first time she had seen Casey, she had bellowed, “Someone needs to feed that boy!” and had proceeded to fire up a barbecue in a hole in Jim’s yard. She never came to Jim’s house without something for Casey—sunscreen, comic books, a cooler full of ice cream.  
  
One sizzling afternoon, Cheryl decided they should all get the hell out of Jim’s shack and go to the beach at China Point. They took Cheryl’s car—it was a GTO, and Cheryl let Zeke drive. That was the best afternoon, roaring down the county road under blazing sun, swamp grass whipping past on the left and right while Casey, Jim and Cheryl hollered along with some creaky classic rock on the radio. Later, Zeke would never be able to recall if it had been ZZ Top or The Band or The Doobie Brothers. It didn’t matter. Maybe it was all of them. At the beach, Casey went tearing off into the water with Jim before Zeke could stop him, and he was amazed to see that Casey was swimming, not just swimming but laughing as if nothing bad had ever happened to him.  
  
“Huh,” Zeke said, watching him from the shore.  
  
“Huh what?” Cheryl asked beside him.  
  
Zeke could never have explained all that he knew of Casey, all that he had been through with him. He shook his head and said, “I didn’t know he could swim,” before realizing how strange it might seem not to know that about his own brother.  
  
Cheryl looked out, shading her eyes against the sun. “He’s real good at it, too,” she said simply, and smiled at Zeke.  
  
It sometimes occurred to Zeke that he was leading the life he might have led anyway. What would he have done with himself if the Herrington thing hadn’t happened? Gone to college? Jesus Christ, he hadn’t even taken his SATs. What else might he have done? Used his parents’ connections to land a job somewhere? Not likely—even if they had been willing to help their wastrel son in that way, Zeke wouldn’t have been interested. So sometimes Zeke thought that maybe he had just wound up, by a circuitous route, where he was supposed to be. And sometimes Zeke would look at Casey, sitting beside him in the front of Jim’s truck or swimming in the warm Gulf water off China Point and think that maybe he had even wound up just a little bit better than that. Zeke knew that was a stupid thought, because they had both gone through hell, Casey far more than himself, and so it was a selfish thought as well. Nevertheless, the thought came to Zeke’s mind from time to time that summer, and Zeke found that he enjoyed it and let it stay.  


  
_____  
  


In August, Slim Jim disappeared for a few days. He came back with two guys he’d hooked up with,  Gus and Petey, no last names.

Assorted characters had drifted through Jim’s swampy hideout over the summer, which wasn’t unusual for someone in Jim’s line of work. Gus and Petey were different. It wasn’t that they were scruffy—no one who showed up at Jim’s wasn’t scruffy. These guys almost weren’t scruffy enough. They had the look down pat, with their mangy facial hair and K-Mart cabana wardrobes, but it didn’t sit well on them. The biggest difference though, was in their eyes. The eyes of most of Jim’s visitors were either skittish or calculating. Gus and Petey’s eyes were clear, sharp. They were not men who used or dealt.

Casey saw it first, with the weird sort of perception he had. Zeke sometimes wondered if Casey had always been that way, or if it was because of what had happened to him. He distrusted just about everyone at first, but some people made him almost sick with anxiety, and Zeke had learned to trust Casey’s instincts. Casey had been at the kitchen table when Jim had come in with Gus and Petey, and at first, Zeke had been too busy sizing up the newcomers to notice how quiet Casey had become. But after a while he realized that Casey had not only gone silent, he had also put down the sandwich he’d been eating and was sitting stiffly with his head down and his hands gripping the edge of the table. Jim, Gus and Petey were drinking beer and yukking it up about something; Zeke stood at the kitchen sink, watching them and Casey. He saw that in between laughs and swigs of beer, Petey’s eyes would cut to Casey, just for a second, and there was something in his face that began to set off warning bells in Zeke’s head. Once, Petey glanced at Zeke and Zeke met his eyes and gave him a stiff smile.

“Jim says you’re the chef,” Petey said cheerfully.

“Something like that,” Zeke responded. He let his eyes roam over Petey, and noticed the tan line of an absent wedding band on his left hand.

“He says you’re the best.” Zeke raised his eyebrows and shrugged. From the corner of his eye, he saw Casey get up and slip out the door, onto the screened porch.

Zeke waited until Petey had turned his attention back to Jim and Gus before following Casey out onto the porch. It was pitch dark and stifling. Casey wasn’t in the hammock.

“Case?” he whispered. “Casey?”

A small scuffling sound led Zeke to the corner, where Casey was huddled, his arms wrapped around his knees. He knelt down and put his hand on Casey’s sticky shoulder. Casey was trembling slightly and Zeke felt his stomach dip; he hadn’t seen Casey this frightened in months.

Casey turned to look at Zeke, his face a ghostly sphere in the dark. “Are they gone?” he whispered.

“No, they’re still here.”

“I don’t like them.”

“Yeah,” Zeke said. “I don’t like them either.”

“I want them to leave.”

“Me too.” He squeezed Casey’s shoulder. “After they’re gone, we’ll have to leave too.”

He felt Casey look up at him. “I like it here,” Casey said. “As long as they’re not here. I don’t want to go.”

“I don’t think it’s safe anymore.”

“Can we go back to Minnesota?”

“No, at least…not now. Maybe in winter. You understand.”

Casey was silent. He put his head down and nodded.

“I’m sorry, Casey.”

“It’s not your fault,” Casey said. “It’s theirs . Why couldn’t they have stayed away?’

“I don’t know.”

Zeke stayed out on the porch with Casey. He was jumpy enough that he considered just getting in the car and leaving, but all of their things were in the house, including his gun and all the money he had made. He wasn’t leaving without it. Gus and Petey were not after them; he was sure they were run-of-the-mill narcs, FBI or DEA. But if they got busted along with Jim, it wouldn’t be long before someone outside of the FBI or DEA got to them. And the way Petey had been looking at Casey…who knew if he remembered an old kidnapping case from 1999?

Jim came out and told them they were missing the party.

“Casey doesn’t feel well,” Zeke said over his shoulder. Jim hunkered down beside them, his bony knees popping like firecrackers. Zeke wished he’d get lost.

“He’s not going to feel any better out here. It’s hot as a sonofabitch.”

“He’s fine. Go back inside,” Zeke said, and Jim left.

Gus and Petey finally left around midnight. The taillights of their car lit up the screened porch blood red for a moment and Casey tensed beside him, clutching Zeke’s hand.

“It’s okay,” Zeke whispered. “It’s okay, they’re just leaving.”

When the sound of the car had trailed off, Zeke went back inside with Casey. Jim was asleep at the kitchen table.

“Get your stuff,” he told Casey quietly, and started to pack.

Zeke had hoped Jim would stay asleep, but that luck wasn’t with them. Jim woke up just as Zeke was shoving the last of his things in his bag. He turned around in his chair and looked at them blearily.

“What are you doing, man?”

“Leaving,” Zeke said briskly, without looking at him. “Come on, Casey.”

“What the…what the fuck? You’re leaving? What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” Zeke said.

Jim stood up suddenly. His chair fell over with a crash. Casey jumped and spun around.

“You can’t leave, we have…we have a good thing here. We have a business arrangement here, man. Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Zeke looked into Jim’s drunk, outraged face. “Those guys are fucking narcs, Jim. You’ve been set up.”

“What, Gus and Petey?” Jim said incredulously. “No way, those guys are cool. I know those guys.”

“Yeah? How long have you known them?”

“What…I don’t know. Couple of months…they’re good guys. I know these things.”

“They’re narcs, Jim. They’re setting you up for a bust. Maybe not tomorrow but whenever it happens, we can’t be here. Be cool about this, Jim, all right? That’s all, just be cool.” In a burst of pity, he added, “And get the fuck out of town for a while, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Be cool about this?” Jim said, and took a stumbling step forward. “Be fucking cool? You’re leaving me high and dry and you’re telling me to be fucking cool?”

“Come on, Casey,” Zeke said, and steered him towards the door.

“No ‘come on Casey’,” Jim shouted. “Fuck that, we had a fucking deal.” He ran a hand through his sparse hair. “Where’s my money?”

Zeke stopped and turned halfway towards Jim. “What money?”

“My money, the money you made off of me.”

“That’s my money, Jim. You got your cut and I got mine. Fair and square. That was our deal, and now it’s over.”

“Fuck you, you leave my money!”

“Jim,” Zeke sighed. “Get some sleep.”

Zeke turned back to the door, with Casey just behind him. He had his hand on the knob when he heard a metallic click behind him. He turned around slowly.

Jim was behind them, a 9mm pistol in his hand. He took a step towards them. Casey backed up against Zeke. Zeke put a hand on Casey’s arm.

“Go sit in the car, Casey,” he said quietly.

“No, don’t go sit in the car, Casey,” Jim said. “No one’s going to sit in the car.”

“Jim…”

“No one’s going to sit in the goddamn car!” Jim shrieked. “No one’s going anywhere until you give me my goddamn money!”

Casey pressed himself against Zeke, breathing quickly. Zeke slid his arm around him, hoping both to calm him and keep him still. If Casey bolted, or made any sudden movement, Zeke knew Jim would shoot him. A roaring anger rose up in him.

“It’s okay,” he said evenly as he could. “You’re right, Jim. No one’s going anywhere. Why don’t we just sit down and have a drink, okay?”

“You’re not leaving?”

“No.”

“You’re gonna stay?”

“Yes.”

The gun wavered and a cracked smile appeared on Jim’s face. “Well, okay,” he said. “Well, okay then. Boy, you sure…”

Jim didn’t get the rest of the sentence out. Zeke had seen his chance as soon as Jim had begun to lower the gun. He pushed Casey away from him, and threw himself at Jim. Jim went over like a bowling pin, and Zeke tore the gun from his hand. He straddled Jim and smacked him hard across the face.

“You fuck! You stupid stoned fuck!”

Jim threw his hands up over his face. “Hey, hey!” he protested feebly, and that made Zeke even angrier. Two seconds ago, this stupid fucker had had a gun pointed at Casey. At Casey . Zeke switched the gun to his right hand and put the barrel against Jim’s forehead. Jim whimpered.

“You like pointing guns at people? Huh? How do you like it? How do you like it, Jim?”

“I didn’t fucking…” Jim babbled, “I wasn’t gonna…I was just…”

“Just what? Just what?” Shoot Casey, that’s what, Zeke thought ferociously. Shoot him after everything, after everything else, he would have gotten shot by you , a stupid fuck, a drunk, stupid loser fucker…

“Zeke!” Casey shouted. “Zeke, stop it!” He felt Casey’s hands around his upper arm. “Stop it!”

“Yeah, listen to your brother, man!” Jim said. He started to cry. “Listen to your brother!”

Zeke looked up at Casey. “Let’s just go,” Casey said. “Okay, Zeke?”

Zeke stared at Casey’s earnest face. He felt the anger ebb out of him, replaced by weariness. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” He clicked the safety back on the gun and climbed off Jim. Jim rolled onto his side and began sobbing loudly.

Casey went out first. Zeke paused at the door and turned back to where Jim lay on the floor.

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

“I thought you guys were my friends,” Jim blubbered. “My fucking friends.”

Zeke closed his eyes for a second and sighed with disgust, pity and fatigue. “Take care of yourself, Jim. Those guys are narcs,” he said. Then he added, “Say goodbye to Cheryl,” and left.

Zeke got in the car and turned the ignition. Casey muttered something.

Zeke flicked on the headlights, illuminating Jim’s sloppy yard. “What?”

“You shouldn’t have done that to Jim.”

Zeke was irritated with Casey for a split second, but knew he was right. Jim had been down and disarmed; Zeke had lost it. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. Jim’ll be all right.”

Casey nodded.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Casey breathed.

“Okay,” Zeke said and put the car in drive.

They had almost cleared the yard when Casey’s sideview mirror exploded. Casey cried out and threw his arms over his head.

“Mother fucker! Get down!” Zeke shouted. He reached out and shoved Casey’s head down as another bullet dinged the roof. Zeke slid down in his seat and floored the gas pedal, sparing a glance into the rearview mirror. There was Slim Jim, a pathetic, strung-out scarecrow, his new shirt flapping around him and his hillbilly shotgun on his shoulder. He was lit up all red by the taillights of Zeke’s car, and he looked like an insane cartoon character.

“You were my fucking friends!” Zeke heard him bawl, and then they turned the bend and Slim Jim was gone.

Zeke expected to see the lights of Jim’s truck rearing up behind him, but he didn’t and finally eased off the gas. Ahead of the car, his headlights carved an arc through the blackness; the swamp pressed in on both sides of the road, whirring with the sound of frogs, bugs and whatever else lived out there. Something huge splattered on the windshield.

“Casey?” Zeke asked. “Casey, you okay?”

Casey didn’t answer. He was bent double over his knees where Zeke had shoved him.

“Casey?” Zeke repeated tensely. He’s not hurt, Zeke thought. He can’t be hurt, the bullets were on the outside, he can’t be… Zeke reached out and shook Casey’s shoulder. “Casey?”

Zeke felt Casey move under his hand and he exhaled in relief. Casey sat up and turned to Zeke, his face pale and sweaty in the dashboard lights.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah,” Casey said. He looked out the windshield for a minute, then turned back to Zeke. “You should’ve hit him harder.”

Zeke grinned; when he glanced to his right, Casey’s face was so screwed up in earnest offense that he burst out laughing.

“Well, I would’ve, but some softie stopped me.”

Casey’s face relaxed into a smile. Zeke reached out and ruffled his hair. “It’s always an adventure, isn’t it, Casey?”

“Yeah,” Casey said. He ducked his head and put his hand over Zeke’s. Zeke turned his palm up and held Casey’s hand.

“An adventure,” Casey said softly.

The road curved sharply. Zeke gave Casey’s fingers a brief squeeze, then slipped out of them to put both of his hands on the wheel.

  


South America, 2011  
  
2011 was not shaping up to be a good year, but then, Zeke knew he wouldn’t remember most of it.  
  
He remembered the hospital in La Paz, and Dr. Lanz. He remembered walking down the hospital’s white steps and out into the noonday square, his side still aching slightly from the healed infection, his head clear for the first time in recent memory. He remembered that, like all drunks and junkies and fuck-ups, he had been forming some sort of resolution to get his shit together.  
  
The first thing to do, of course, would have been to go home, if America was home. With that in mind, he got a passport bearing the name David Simon, and kept off the booze except for a beer here and there. But every time he made plans that tomorrow or next week or the week after he’d head up to the border, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he thought of home, he could think only of Minnesota, specifically of one tiny plot of land there that held Casey’s bones.  
  
Zeke headed south instead of north. He did a few jobs and met a few people, who introduced him to other people, who introduced him to Diego Esteban. To a few earnest souls in the FBI, Esteban was probably Public Enemy Number One. To the people in his hometown, Esteban was a wild success story, virtually a folk hero. In Diego Esteban’s mind, he was little more than a farmer who just knew how to manage his cash crops, which happened to be cocaine and heroin. But Esteban was also an entrepreneur and a man of science who was not content to ship out bulk raw materials like his predecessors. He liked tinkering with his products, finding ways to make them more profitable, easier to ship, harder to detect. Zeke knew he could help him out with that; he also knew that if he could not, one of Esteban’s guys would probably dispatch him quickly. Zeke found that he didn’t particularly care.  
  
Things were good at Esteban’s. Zeke had his own apartment, right above the lab where he worked, not far from Esteban’s house. The food was good, the air conditioning was cold, and he always had a fresh pack of American cigarettes.  
  
There was plenty of booze too, top-shelf stuff. Zeke was able to restrain himself at first, but he was dreaming again, and it became harder to do that. The work he was doing at Esteban’s reminded him of the work he’d done for a strung-out, aging hippie named Slim Jim in the summer of 2002, almost ten years before. And that reminded him of other things, things that turned up unwanted in his sleep—Casey playing cards at night on the screened porch, singing along with the radio on a blazing July afternoon, Casey swimming at China Point, his hair bleached amber by the sun. It was ten years, but it seemed like yesterday, and it might as well have been a thousand years ago for all it mattered now.  
  
Esteban didn’t mind if Zeke got loaded every night; Zeke suspected he actually liked it. As long as it didn’t affect the work, Zeke’s dependency on the alcohol flow meant that he would stay around for a while, and that was just what Zeke intended to do. Frankly, Zeke felt like he could stay there the rest of his life, however long or short that might be.  
  
It sometimes occurred to Zeke that his life was going to end the way it would have anyway. The last time he had seen his father, in a visitor’s room at the Marion County Jail in the long-dead autumn of 1998, he had asked Zeke if he intended to be a loser for the rest of his life. Zeke had answered that he did, thinking with adolescent fury that his father’s definition of a loser was exactly what he wanted to be. But some part of himself had suspected (worried, to be honest) that he was and would always be a loser, not his father’s definition, but his own—someone who didn’t do the right thing even when the choice was clear, who couldn’t accept a genuine offer of help, who made the same goddamned mistakes over and over again. His one redemption from himself had been Casey. Casey, with his stubborn will and his trust and belief. It was only because of Casey that Zeke had ever done anything close to the right thing. And it hadn’t mattered, in the end. He had not been able to save Casey, he had not been able to save the world, and he had wound up, by a torturous route, exactly where he had always been headed. And when he thought of Casey, of the last time he had ever seen him, Zeke understood that he had actually wound up even worse than that, and that others had paid for it far more than he had.  


  
_____  
  


Friends, family and business associates regularly came and went through Esteban’s compound. Many of the business associates were Americans and Esteban would often bring them around to meet Zeke, as if they would somehow have something in common. Zeke wondered if Esteban thought he occasionally needed to be around his fellow gringos to talk about baseball or apple pie or some shit. Still, Esteban was el jefe, and whatever el jefe wanted, el jefe got. Zeke was polite and circumspect with the visitors; his near-constant state of drunkenness or hangover helped with that.  
  
Zeke had been at Esteban’s for a few months when an American named Walters arrived. Esteban never explained what any of these men really did for him; Zeke got the vague impression that Walters ran a small commercial airline that assisted with the steady flow of drugs and money between the U.S. and South America. Esteban asked Zeke to have dinner with them. Zeke agreed, but was in no mood. He’d been getting very drunk in the evenings, and his dreams had not been good. He’d started snorting Esteban’s stuff as well, something he had resisted for a while but now seemed like a good idea.  
  
Walters made things worse by annoying the shit out of Zeke all during dinner. He was a typical gringo, loud and nervous, sucking up to Esteban, telling stupid stories. Esteban and his men usually wore jeans and sport shirts; Walters, like all the gringos, wore loose-fitting tropicasual pastels like something out of a Tennessee Williams play. Or maybe Hemingway. Whatever. Zeke polished off two bottles of wine and smoked himself into a fog.  
  
He finally made it back to his apartment, where he drank some more and passed out. He had a horrific nightmare about Casey at China Point Beach. There was no Slim Jim, no Cheryl, just Casey, way out past the breakers, much farther out than he should have been, and Zeke suddenly realized that Casey was not swimming, he was drowning. He swam out to him and grabbed him around the waist, but whenever he tried to get Casey’s head above the water, Casey would slip through his grasp, and Zeke could see him in the water, staring hopelessly up at Zeke, and the harder Zeke tried to save him, the deeper Casey sank.  
  
He woke up in a sweat, half-whimpering and disgusted with himself. He had a sudden pressing need to get out of the apartment, so he grabbed his cigarettes and went downstairs, where there was a small screened porch. He sat down shakily in one of the wicker chairs and lit a cigarette. After a minute or so, his heart rate had slowed down, and he began to wish he had taken a bottle downstairs with him. He was staring at the insect wings shimmering on the screen and contemplating going back upstairs when he saw someone walking across the compound, his long shadow trailing behind him in the moonlight. The man came into view and Zeke saw it was Walters. He groaned inside and thought about making a break for it, but then he saw that Walters had a bottle of something in his hand, and he began to feel more charitable towards old Walters.  
  
“Knock-knock!” Walters said, tapping on the screen door. “ Don’t know why, but you struck me as a man who can appreciate a good smoke on a fine night.”  
  
“Looks that way,” Zeke said with a faint smile. His hands were shaking a little, and he wanted Walters to come in and start pouring.  
  
Walters let himself in. “Maybe you can appreciate this, too,” he said, and set the bottle down on the table next to Zeke. It was Johnny Walker Blue, the stuff that sold for 300 bucks back in the States, and went for twice that down here. Esteban kept that sort of thing for himself.  
  
“I would have shared it with our host, but I decided to keep it just between us gringos, eh?”  
  
He winked and sat down, and Zeke decided that Walters may have been boring but he wasn’t such a bad guy, after all.  
  
The scotch was like a balm to his soul. Walters was more than generous with it; every time Zeke picked up his glass, it seemed full again. What the hell, he needed it. He needed to relax. No harm in relaxing once in a while, for Christ’s sake.  
  
Walters looked twice as drunk as he was; the guy was practically falling out of his chair. He had been going on for some time about all the things he missed in the States, everything from Monday Night Football to ChiChi’s Restaurants.  
  
“Would you believe it?” Walters slurred. “Here I am, in fucking South America, and I’m craving ChiChi’s. Fucking ChiChi’s! How about that?”  
  
“How about it?” Zeke answered, and picked up his glass. It was full again.  
  
“Man,” Walters said. “Why do we do it? Why the fuck do we do it? Why don’t we all just go home and…move to small-town USA or some shit? Huh? You ever think about that?”  
  
A sudden image of Herrington came to Zeke, of its neat, tree-lined streets and gabled houses, of Friday night high school football and streetlights that turned to blinkers after 10 p.m. He’d dreamt of Herrington a few nights ago, of Casey, high school Casey under the yellow sodium arcs in the parking lot, wearing his bag across his shoulder and his camera around his neck. 1998 all over again, and none of it had happened. He had woken up with a hollow ache in his chest. Zeke put down his glass to light a cigarette. His hand shook.  
  
“Seriously man,” Walters continued. “What the fuck are we doing down here? I mean, Dave, Davey-boy, do you ever say to yourself, ‘I should just pack it up and go home?’ You look like an all-American kinda guy. What are you doing down here?”  
  
Zeke shrugged and dragged on the cigarette, so drunk he could barely taste it.  
  
“I mean, I look at a guy like you and I wonder what drove you down here, you know?” Walters jovially clapped Zeke on the arm. “Really, man? How’d you wind up here?”  
  
Zeke looked at Walters and smiled faintly. “Same way you did.”  
  
“Aw, bullshit!” Walters said. He wagged a finger in Zeke’s face. “You’ve got a story, man, I can tell. You’re a man of mystery. What was it…some broad? I bet it was some broad, right?”  
  
Zeke thought of Marybeth and almost laughed. “Something like that,” he said.  
  
“I’ll bet it’s a hell of a story,” Walters said.  
  
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Zeke said, and then he did laugh, a half-hearted, tired sound.  
  
“Bet I would! I’ve heard some crazy shit in my day, crazy shit. Like, I’d even believe you if you told me…I don’t know…if you told me aliens had tried to take over the world, and you were fighting them. You were working for some underground alien resistance. I’d even believe that.”  
  
Zeke froze, his eyes on the glowing ash of his cigarette. Something big zinged off the screen, but otherwise it was quiet, so quiet that Zeke could hear his own pulse.  
  
“You don’t remember me, do you, Zeke?”  
  
The sound of his real name sliced through Zeke’s alcohol fog. He looked up and stared at Walters, but between drunkenness and the dim light, nothing came to him.  
  
“I remember you, though,” Walters continued. “Oh, I certainly do. The last time I saw you, you were a punk-ass kid sitting in an Ohio county jail. You don’t look like you’ve done much better for yourself. Although,” he said, and chuckled affably, “the years have certainly been kinder to your hairline than to mine.”  
  
“Who the fuck are you?”  
  
“I,” Walters said, and poured himself another drink, “am…well, I guess you could call me an ambassador. Back then though, back then, I specialized in recruitment. Tried to recruit you , remember? Made you an offer you didn’t seem to have much trouble refusing.” His pale eyes looked at Zeke over his glass. He downed his drink in one gulp, poured another.  
  
Zeke’s mind swam back to an afternoon more than ten years before, to two men visiting him in jail before his sentencing, right around the time his father had asked his prophetic question. We could make things easier for you, they had said, and Zeke remembered the pale eyes of a man younger than the one before him and dressed not in tropicasuals but in a dark suit with black shoes, impeccably shined—the same man nonetheless. Zeke was swiftly, painfully aware of how drunk he was.  
  
“How did you…”  
  
“Oh, don’t worry, Zeke. I didn’t track you down. Believe me, this was completely unexpected. Funny thing, though, finding you down here on our side after all.”  
  
Zeke shook his head. “What…no…”  
  
“Oh, yes. Our mutual friend in there, the caballero? He’s on our side.” Walters laughed. “He doesn’t know it either, can you imagine? But, hey, all’s fair when you’re trying to make a difference in the world, isn’t that the truth?”  
  
Zeke swallowed hard, fighting back a tide of nausea. “Make a difference,” he said thickly. “By working for them.”  
  
Walters sipped his drink, shook his head. “I work for progress, Zeke. I work for a new world order. One where people will live in harmony, all striving for a common goal. The naysayers, they call it an invasion. It’s a liberation, Zeke. Liberation from the human condition. That’s what you people don’t understand. Don’t look surprised. I know all about you, Zeke, and what you’ve been doing with yourself since that county jail. The ‘resistance.’ You made the wrong decision that day, Zeke, and you just kept on making them. You fucked yourself, Zeke. You fucked your friend, too. We might have helped him, if you’d helped us.”  
  
Zeke’s blood was roaring in his ears. He felt as if he’d been dipped in lighter fluid and set on fire. “I know how you fucking helped him,” he said through clenched teeth.  
  
Walters shrugged. “That was unfortunate. But the individual isn’t more important than the greater goal. You never understood that, either. When you turned down our offer, we expected you’d end up on the other side. But you didn’t, at least not for years. Because of him, wasn’t it? The rest of it wasn’t your problem. Protecting him was the most important thing to you. You really thought that was what you were doing.”  
  
Zeke heard Walters sit back in his chair. He heard the striking of a match, and smelled cigar smoke. He stared at his trembling hands, paralyzed by anger and alcohol. Walters’ voice drifted on the humid night air.  
  
“Worked out for us, anyway. The less help they got, the better. So you fucked your friend and you still wound up working for us anyway, Zeke, just by doing nothing.” Walters laughed again, that same genial chuckle. “Boy, I sure hope he was worth it. I understand there wasn’t much left of him.”  
  
“You son of a bitch,” Zeke hissed.  
  
“Did you say something, Zeke?”  
  
“You son of a bitch,” Zeke repeated. He stood up and lurched unsteadily at Walters, ready to tear his head off his neck.  
  
Walters was on his feet, steady as if he’d been drinking spring water all night. A gun appeared in his hand like a magician’s trick, the barrel against Zeke’s forehead.  
  
“Sit down, Zeke.”  
  
“I will kill you,” Zeke spat. “I will fucking kill you.”  
  
“No, you won’t. There’s no point in it. You must know that. Kill me and fifty others will take my place. I’m a cog in the machine, Zeke, just like you. Only this machine can’t be stopped. We may be set back a little, but we haven’t lost yet. Not even close. So sit down and have another drink. You look like you need it.”  
  
Zeke stood there, Walters’ gun pressed against his temple. He had never hated anyone in his life the way he hated Walters. Walters was the face of what had happened at Herrington, of everything that had happened since then. Walters was everyone who had stolen Casey’s life, everyone who had pursued them for six years, everything that Casey had fought against with the conviction and faith that Zeke had never had, except in Casey himself. Zeke would not give him the pleasure of pulling the trigger.  
  
He sat down heavily. Walters put away his gun.  
  
“What do you want?” Zeke asked.  
  
Walters laughed. “Want? I don’t want anything from you, Zeke. Not anymore. The time for offers was years ago. You’re no use to us now. Or to anyone else.” He leaned over Zeke. “I’d blow your fucking brains out, only I know I’d be doing you a favor.”  
  
Walters turned to go. At the door, he stopped and turned back.  
  
“Good night, Zeke. Maybe I’ll see you again. Probably not.”  
  
Zeke closed his eyes. You won’t see me, he thought. But I will see you.  
  
Walters left. The door closed softly behind him.  


  
_____  
  


There were two things Zeke knew that Walters did not. One was that Zeke sobered up quickly. The other was that Zeke had never lost the habit of being observant, and so he had observed that Esteban’s favored guests always slept in the same room.  
  
Zeke went upstairs and made himself a cup of tea, which he drank slowly. When he was finished, he took some of his things and put them in a bag. Among them were the new passport and identification he had made for himself, in case he had decided that he didn’t enjoy being Esteban’s chemist after all. He went downstairs to the lab, and stayed there for about an hour. Some of the materials he had worked with were highly flammable.  
  
When he was done in the lab, he went to the main house. Esteban was a prudent man, yet possessed of a swaggering bravado. He had never installed a security system in the main house, preferring to rely on his men and their guns. The compound was well-guarded by Esteban’s men, but they could not be everywhere at once, and the other habit Zeke had never lost was that of stealth.  
  
Later, he would remember the things that had happened in the clearest detail. At the time, it seemed that they were happening to someone else. He felt only an unbearable ache throughout his chest, his bones. Walters kicked like a bull when Zeke cut his throat. Zeke held Walters’ head down to keep the blood from spraying, and lay on top of him until he knew Walters was dead. The first person Zeke had ever killed had been his science teacher, many years before. When he finally stood up from the bed, he knew Walters would be his last.  
  
It’s over, he thought and realized he was speaking to Casey. Casey, it’s over.  
  
He went back to the lab and set the fires there. They would burn slowly, giving him time to get away, and the confusion of the fire would cover his tracks. They would find a charred body in the apartment and think it was Zeke, no doubt smoking in bed while drunk. They would find Walters’ room empty, the bedspread neatly hiding a blood-soaked mattress. It would buy him time.  
  
A day later, Zeke left South America and made his way through the narrow bridge of land that linked it to Mexico. After crossing the border into Chiapas, Zeke had his first drink in almost a week.  
  
He spent his second night in Mexico in San Cristobal. He woke up with the familiar sensation of a deep-set hangover, and Walters’ voice in his mind, telling him that they hadn’t lost yet.  
  
We have to fight, another voice answered, and that was Casey’s, and Zeke could see him, could suddenly see him so clearly, standing on the front lawn of the old house, on a warm September evening some thirteen years before.  
  
Zeke rolled over and sat up. The phantom voices departed. He wanted a drink, and beyond that, he had a great and unexpected desire to see the ocean. The Pacific was less than a hundred miles to the south, but Zeke knew he would go north instead, to the Gulf of Mexico. He’d been there with Casey, hadn’t he?  
  
North it is, Zeke thought. He left San Cristobal an hour later, headed for the Gulf.


End file.
